For their first date, in February 1953, Richard Seaver and Jeannette Medina went to see a new play called En Attendant Godot. In her telling, there were fewer than a dozen people in the audience. Dick put the number at “thirty-some,” though only half of them made it to the end. Still, he later recalled, it was an improvement over the opening night, a few weeks earlier, when the house was almost as barren as the withered tree onstage.
Dick, a collegiate wrestler and naval officer from New England, had come to Paris on a Fulbright scholarship in 1950 to study at the Sorbonne. One day, while passing the publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit, two books in the window caught his eye: Molloy and Malone Meurt. Both were by Samuel Beckett, a name he’d come across while writing his thesis on James Joyce. Unlike a lot of Left Bank expats, Dick spoke flawless French, which was a good thing, because the novels weren’t available in English.
